CBS Apologizes for Report on Bush Guard Service

After nearly two weeks at the center of a news media storm, Dan Rather and CBS News admitted yesterday that they could not authenticate four documents the network had used to raise new questions about President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service and said the news report had been a "mistake in judgment."

Network officials said a former Texas National Guard officer had misled their producers about how he obtained the documents, which came under scrutiny almost as soon as the network broadcast its report on the CBS Evening News and "60 Minutes" on Sept. 8. While CBS stopped short of calling the memos a fraud, it said it could not now say for certain where the documents came from.

"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report," said Andrew Heyward, the CBS News president. "We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret."

The network's admission tarnishes the reputation of what was once the nation's most prestigious broadcast news division. Just two weeks ago, its 72-year-old anchor seemed to have one of the biggest stories of the campaign, in the twilight of his career.

Mr. Rather initially insisted that the wide questioning of the documents--purportedly from the personal files of Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, Mr. Bush's squadron commander--came in large measure from partisans, delivered his own apology yesterday during his evening broadcast. "I want to say personally and directly I'm sorry," he said, adding, "This was an error made in good faith."

The day's concessions were a sharp turnaround from more than a week ago, when CBS News officials and Mr. Rather, for decades the face of CBS News, were standing steadfastly by the report, dismissing days of accusations from document experts that the records were fakes produced on a modern computer.

Network officials yesterday admitted that the man who gave them the documents had lied about where he got them, and that inconsistencies in the cloak-and-dagger account he gave them in the past few days had left CBS unable to say definitively where they came from. Moreover, CBS was unable to reach the person the man identified as his source, Mr. Rather said .

In an interview broadcast on CBS last night, the former guardsman who gave the memos to the network, Bill Burkett, acknowledged that he had lied. Mr. Burkett told Mr. Rather that he had felt pressure from CBS to reveal his source, and so "simply threw out a name" to explain how he had come by the documents. He insisted he had not forged them.

The network said it was appointing a panel of experts to review how such a flawed report got onto the air, especially one with such potential implications for a sitting president some 50 days before an election. It said it would make the results public.

The network's admissions quickly reverberated on the campaign trail. Mr. Bush's spokesman, Scott McClellan demanded that the source of the documents be found. White House officials also called on the campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry, to explain any contact it has had with Mr. Burkett. Joe Lockhart, a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry, acknowledged today that he had talked to Mr. Burkett. He said he had done so at the behest of a CBS producer, who had promised to help Mr. Burkett, an ardent Bush opponent, relay some campaign advice. Mr. Lockhart said there was no connection between the campaign and the memos.

Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee said attention should still be paid to questions about whether Mr. Bush fulfilled his service obligations three decades ago.

CBS News officials said yesterday "a perfect storm," of circumstances -- including intense competition, faith in the reputation and judgment of a producer, and the reliance on a source with questionable integrity -- had led to their journalistic lapse.

But there was dissension inside CBS News, according to a number of people interviewed, with some saying that Mr. Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, had simply relied too much on one dubious source. "These are not standards that would ever be tolerated," said Morley Safer, a correspondent on the sister "60 Minutes" Sunday program.

By the accounts of Mr. Rather and other officials, they began to understand that their defense was unsustainable last Thursday, when Mr. Burkett confessed to CBS that he had lied about where he got the four memorandums. While he had initially said he gotten them from another former guardsman, people at CBS said, he then told them that the documents came through a convoluted process that started with a phone call from a stranger and ended with the handoff of an envelope at the boisterous Houston Livestock Show.

Mr. Rather flew to Texas to interview Mr. Burkett on Saturday. By Sunday, the tapes were back in New York, and network officials say they knew they had a serious problem.

They said they had had a brief moment of hope when they believed they had deduced the name of a woman who might have called Mr. Burkett to offer him the documents. But on Monday, they were giving up on that lead, too.

"We couldn't confirm the new story -- maybe it's true -- but we can't confirm it," said one official at the network who spoke on condition of anonymity. "And in the meantime we're hanging out there, we have vouched for these things and we don't have anything to stand on. We've come to the moment where there's nothing to prove his story."

Mr. Rather and Ms Mapes, a respected producer whose credits include securing the photographs of the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison for CBS this spring, had been working on the story of Mr. Bush's National Guard Service since Mr. Bush's first presidential campaign. They knew that other reporters were working on the same story.

Mr. Bush's aides have repeatedly said that the president fulfilled his service obligations, but the official record left gaps, including questions about why Mr. Bush failed to take his pilot physical.

Mr. Rather said he and Ms. Mapes had heard that there were records that could fill that gap and, Mr. Rather said, "We worked it."

About 18 months ago, they focused on Mr. Burkett, who said he had overheard aides to Mr. Bush, when he was governor of Texas, instructing guard officials to scrub his file of anything embarrassing. Mr. Burkett went public with that account last February. "We accelerated our questioning," Mr. Rather said.

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By mid-August, they did not have the documents. Around then, Gary Killian, whose father had been Mr. Bush's squadron commander, got a call from Ms. Mapes, asking if he knew where she might find memos his father had apparently written criticizing Mr. Bush's service. Gary Killian said that he and his stepmother both told Ms. Mapes they did not believe the elder Mr. Killian had kept such records, and that he had thought well of Mr. Bush.

The Friday before Labor Day, Mr. Rather said yesterday, he heard that Ms. Mapes had the documents. He was in Florida covering Hurricane Frances, and flew to Texas.

In the course of their conversations with Mr. Burkett, the team had grown increasingly confident in his story, he said. Mr. Rather said they had called his friends and neighbors to get a sense of his credibility and were satisfied.

"I knew him before by telephone," Mr. Rather said, "and otherwise had checked out what his reputation was in the community that he lived, and even people who disliked him and had arguments with him, including Republicans and supporters of Bush. They all said he's a truth teller."

Mr. Rather said that Mr. Burkett had initially refused to say who gave him the documents, and that CBS pressured him to do so. "We made it clear that the chain of possession was very important to us," Mr. Rather said.

Mr. Rather recalled that Mr. Burkett had said he had gotten the documents from a former guard member who was now overseas. Mr. Rather said producers had tried to get in touch with him, but could not. Knowing his identity bolstered the team's confidence just the same.

"It was a person who could have had direct access to Killian's files," he said. "That made it believable."

A lawyer for Mr. Burkett, Gabe Quintanilla, said Monday that his client was given the documents at the livestock show in March, and kept them to himself because he did not know whether they were authentic.

"This is a simple West Texan middle-aged gentleman going along his own way when this happens to get dumped in his lap," the lawyer said.

After months of pressure from CBS, Mr. Quintanilla said: "He said I'll give these to you on the condition that you have them subjected to the highest scrutiny. Quite frankly, it's unfortunate that their job wasn't done on that end."

In a posting on an e-mail newsletter for Texas Democrats, Mr. Burkett wrote yesterday, "Don't believe everything you read -- even from CBS."

The network's executives acknowledge that its team's failure to get in contact with the supposed original source should have been a red flag. But they said they had remained confident because Ms. Mapes and Mr. Rather had such confidence in Mr. Burkett. They also believed their other reporting had affirmed the sentiments Colonel Killian supposedly expressed in the documents. The White House, moreover, did not initially raise any doubts about the memos.

"We were completely confident from what we were hearing from Mary, and there was no reason not to trust her," said Josh Howard, the executive producer of the "60 Minutes" Wednesday edition.

The papers seemed to hand the network a huge scoop, purporting to document how Colonel Killian -- who died 20 years ago -- had felt pressure to "sugar coat" Mr. Bush's record because the young lieutenant, whose father was the ambassador to the United Nations, was "talking to someone upstairs." They indicated that Mr. Bush had been suspended from flying because he had not met guard standards, and had failed to appear for a physical examination.

Mr. Heyward has said his confidence was first jolted when Mr. Killian's secretary, Marian Carr Knox, stepped forward to say that while she had typed similar memos about Mr. Bush for Mr. Killian, she believed that the CBS documents were fake. Around then, Mr. Burkett admitted to Ms. Mapes that he had lied about the provenance of the documents.

On Thursday, Mr. Rather and other CBS officials talked to him by telephone. "That was the first time I heard him say, 'Look, I have misled you about one thing and one thing only," Mr. Rather said. Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes persuaded Mr. Burkett to speak on camera. On Mr. Heyward's orders, one of his top deputies, Betsy West, accompanied Mr. Rather to Dallas for the interview, a four-hour session.